speed

There are an almost unlimited number of drills for speed training. If you think about this, it makes sense. At the highest levels, track and field coaching often has to focus on the minutiae of athlete movements and many of these drills help to perfect an aspect of the skill. In addition, with the proliferation of sports performance facilities there is a need to attract paying clients via marketing and these drills help to sell services. While there isn’t...

“Train for what you want” This is one of the most fundamental principles in strength and conditioning and it’s the one that everyone overthinks and makes too complicated. For most of us, this is really simple. If you want to improve on something then you have to practice the thing you want to improve on. Failing to do this means that you are relying on chance to make improvements, which is not a good idea for a competitive athlete...

I have taken some heat about speed and sports posts. The crux of these posts is that we have to stop thinking of training hundred meter sprinters when we are training athletes to run fast. While the techniques and training modes of hundred meter sprinters work great for them, focusing solely on these can ignore the needs of athletes. With that in mind, today’s post is going to look at baseball – specifically the offensive side of baseball and...

I’m not going to lie, I’m going to annoy some people with this post. This is a “food for thought” post. That means that I’m going to point some things out, but I’m not going to solve them with this post. If you’ve been in the strength and conditioning field for more than a few months, you’ve heard of the principle of specificity. This principle says that you adapt to training according to the way in which you train....

Prioritize for Program Success Today a strength and conditioning coach has way to many things that they have to develop. The internet and equipment companies don’t make this any easier because both things muddy the waters and distort what our athletes need. Today a strength and conditioning coach is expected to increase strength, improve power, develop speed and agility, work on core strength/endurance, develop mobility, increase muscle size (if necessary), educate athletes on nutrition, warm the athlete up for...